Because then they can avoid social media again by building their own catalog of interest.

What is Reddit if not a glorified collection of RSS feeds with comments?

RSS is great for following blogs and sites of specific interests, like local sites, or sites about specific subjects. You get ALL the updates. For example. I live in Baltimore and have a bunch of local sites in my RSS reader.

Reddit/Lemmy, on the other hand, is a more democratically human curated and upvoted aggregator so while it hits all the popular stuff beyond the topics you follow on RSS, it will miss a lot too.

So I use both.

Feedly for hundreds of sites of interest. And Reddit and now Lemmy for the rest.

Good stuff!

Unpopular opinion but I switched from RSS to Google News and Reddit / Lemmy for basically 2 things:

I like the Google algorithm for news (guess that's why it's called that) it shows relevant news, especially local. When I subscribed to local news papers' RSS, for example, they pump a lot of articles and the relevant news were difficult to spot. It still lags behind on tech news for instance.

I switched to Reddit because of the community content: conversations. On RSS you get all the news and all that but it lacks the social aspect, people discussing an article, learning from others. This is why I'm still here.

i would love it to return.

RSS never died though, I have at least 50 web sites that I follow.

The big platforms have gotten a lot worse.

Twitter went fascist.
Canadians can't share news articles on Facebook.
Reddit self-owned.

Who the fuck Google searches for "RSS"?

Some of us are "hyped" about it because when RSS fell out of favor we lost some of the RSS feeds we were using. This forced some of us to go looking for alternatives because the sites that had RSS feeds and dropped them were no longer accessible that way. And given that we see less ads and have to deal with less algorithms this way, we enjoy using RSS. If it becomes relevant enough again maybe those sources that were lost will come back. To be fair that's probably a pipe dream. But ease of use, and use case are definitely some of the reasons.

I still use Feedly daily!

Most RSS feeds suck these days because sites just half ass those and put a link and 1 sentence inside, if even that.

You should not assume that the google trend for RSS is linked to the popularity of RSS feeds. Nowadays, techies uses the term, but it is somewhat hidden for a lot of people through aggregation services and other names (atom, feed, etc.).

Contrary to the trend, there's been a handful of people moving back to decentralized sites that supports it, and a lot of big sites never stopped supporting it. And it gets advertised as an alternative, even if not under the "rss" name.

People switched to twitter, that seems to be wearing off...

I never stopped using RSS but its always been an additional source not the sole source of info for me. A lot of folks I've followed on various social media or who write for online mags have a personal site where they post long-form stuff. RSS is great if you want to just get a list of those authors latest posts and you don't want to sort through thousands of other stories to find them.

Personally I like using the Livemarks add-on in Firefox because I'm already in the browser anyway and I can manage those bookmarks using the standard bookmarks manager to keep them in any organizational structure I find convenient. Here's the github page but you can search for it in Firefox Add-ons as well: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/

I used to rely on news feeds through Firefox until they suddenly removed this feature. I switched to an RSS reader but around the same time, a lot of websites started dropping their RSS feeds. I'm out of the loop of why this happened and it's probably one reason I feel so bored being online nowadays

Maybe sort of off topic, but it seems like activity pub could provide the same functionality (and maybe more) as RSS.

If a news site or anything else that posts stuff periodically supported the activitypub protocol, anyone could subscribe to it, just like rss. Then when anything is posted you'd see it in your feed.

With activitypub (and not rss) you could comment on it and see other peoples comments, and crosspost it elsewhere.

I just couldn't get into RSS feeds back when it was growing in its popularity. No chance I'll understand using it any better now lol. I am a fool of a took.

By the way, how to RSS your lemmy communities?

I use a RSS reader for my daily news across multiple sites and I don't know what to do if sites stop supporting it.

For me it has to do with this

1. I want a feed that updates based on my subscription
2. That subscription content could be anything, blog posts, updates on a Wikipedia page (to keep up to date with a news story that is out of the limelight), or get updated with a XKCD comic

RSS meets both these, dead simple. It's also low in data usage, but it's for those reasons that I recently started using RSS after leaving it years ago.

P.S. I believe some blame goes toward "fragmentation", i.e. we still need to check a couple of websites for something new. RSS solves that by bringing all that into one place

I miss RSS.

RSS is great for news, because you don't get told what to think by a 3rd party algorithm, you aggregate news from trusted sites (multiple) and decide what to read.

RSS also is extremely important for podcasts, that's how it gets pushed down to your listening app (except for specific ones like Spotify and whatnot that host the content)